An Anaheim woman pleaded guilty on Thursday, Aug. 27 to healthcare fraud for submitting more than $2.2 million in Medicare claims for hospice care provided to patients who were not terminally ill.<\/p>\n
Lynn Galbraith, 60, pleaded guilty to one count of healthcare fraud and faces up to 10 years in federal prison, according to the U.S. Attorney\u2019s Office.<\/p>\n
Galbraith co-owned and operated Garden Grove-based Azure Hospice Care from September 2019 until July 2022, when she became the company\u2019s sole owner, prosecutors said. She remained the sole owner until February 2024.<\/p>\n
According to her plea agreement, Galbraith knowingly submitted or caused the submission of Medicare claims for\u00a0hospice\u00a0services involving beneficiaries who did not have a terminal illness with a life expectancy of six months or less.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors said Galbraith either knew the patients did not qualify for\u00a0hospice\u00a0care or knew their medical records did not contain sufficient documentation supporting a diagnosis and prognosis that qualified them for Medicare\u00a0hospice\u00a0benefits.<\/p>\n
Galbraith admitted submitting approximately $2.27 million in fraudulent claims to Medicare on behalf of Azure\u00a0Hospice\u00a0Care, with Medicare paying the company approximately $2.14 million.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An Anaheim woman pleaded guilty on Thursday, Aug. 27 to healthcare fraud for submitting more than $2.2 million…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":445537,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,165,30750,164,7,1312,138,100,611,136],"class_list":["post-445536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-hills","tag-anaheim-news","tag-california","tag-courts","tag-crime-and-public-safety","tag-news","tag-orange-county","tag-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=445536"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445536\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/445537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=445536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=445536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=445536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}